At last, we’ve finally been able to get some tomatoes to grow! This year we moved them from our side yard to the planter boxes in the back and we’ve been able to get much better results. We think that the old spot was harboring some tomato blight in the soil…the plants would start off OK and then die off from the ground up leaving a spindly, sick looking plant at the end of the season with little to no tomatoes. Here’s what we’ve got going so far…nice healthy tomato plants!

Along with the tomatoes, we’ve interspersed some marigolds, basil and an eggplant which is also doing well.

We picked these four little guys the other day to cook down and puree for Daws and Ella…their first food from the backyard!

It has definitely been a while since our last post and a lot has happened since then. Our sweet little ones arrived in December- Dawsey and Eloise were born just before Christmas and have epitomized the essence of eating local…mostly from mom. Now that they’re old enough, we’ve been introducing them to some solid foods which they’ve been eating with reckless abandon! Now that fruits and vegetables have been coming into season, we’ve been moving from frozen, store bought fare to things that are a little more local…so we thought that this would be the perfect time to revive the blog and get some posts out in regards to what we’ve been able to do with two seven month old infants in the mix. This past weekend we were able to spend some time at the Goddard Park Farmer’s Market on Friday and the Providence Farmer’s Market on Saturday…luckily, we found some of Daws’ and Ella’s favorite vegetables- carrots!

Carrots ready for prep.

All the veggies get cooked up and blended into a puree, then frozen in ice cube trays for single serving sizes. So far D+E have enjoyed applesauce, peaches, pears, green beans, bananas, peas, acorn squash, winter squash, avocado, potato and sweet potato. As summer progresses and their palates expand, we’ll add to their variety depending on what’s available at the markets.

As for us, we found some great peaches, plums and nectarines to snack on:

…as for this blog, we’ll strive to post once a week or so on our food adventures both adult and baby!

Hello all! Sorry for the lack of posting lately- things have been pretty busy and with our lackluster homegrown crops this year there really hasn’t been too much to report. Some of you might be wondering where our tales of tackling the 100 mile challenge have been this year- we’ve decided not to partake because we are due to have twins in December! We didn’t want to compromise Ingrid’s nutritional requirements or have the added pressure of finding locally sourced goods during the challenge. As for this blog, we’ll still keep it up and running and try to post periodically but it may shift in content from time to time depending on what’s going on with the babies…things are going to get interesting!

…we picked up some of these guys at the Goddard Park Farmer’s Market on Friday from Tony’s seafood- straight from Narragansett Bay…and they were only a dollar a piece! Since they were already cooked, all we had to do is dig out the meat. There wasn’t much to be had in the bodies- we’ll use those for stock, but the legs had some sizable chunks of meat that was pretty sweet- no adornment needed.

…our garden has been under a full-on assault from every direction- the tomatoes have blight, the chipmunks, squirrels and bunny have been chowing down, there are mites in the hops and we also found a tomato hornworm on one of our non-blighted tomatoes. Here are a couple of pictures of our blighted tomatoes:

…next year, we are going to do a major shakeup of our plantings…everything will be rotated into new areas and hopefully we can get better results.